Gnome · I still don't have a title

GNOME 2.30

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:53:00 +0000

Congratulations to everyone involved in what looks like a very good GNOME release!

Interesting times are now ahead for the GNOME project, as on the plate is now a big release like 3.0. That will mean a lot of changes to the desktop we’ve got used to in the last decade, and I hope it ends up being successful, innovative and useful.

Debian has packages for GNOME Shell, and a special gnome3-session which starts Mutter + Shell. I experimented with it last week at my work place, and had mixed feelings with the current status.

I’m not a big fan of hard dependencies on Direct Rendering. My main computer is an Athlon 800MHz. Compiz crawls on it, and sadly Mutter is basically unusable on it. At the office, I have P4-based system with 1GB of RAM, which runs GNOME 2.28 OK. When I switched to the GNOME 3 session, it showed that it’s getting old. I also experienced X crashes and kernel oopses, apparently a classic for ATI users using a composited window manager. This being said, I consider myself lucky because both systems have ATI cards and can do DRI using free software. If I was forced to use nVidia non-free drivers, it’d probably mean I’d stick with the Panel until that wasn’t an option at all.

I am aware we’ll see improvements both in Xorg/kernel and GNOME before GNOME 3.0 is released next Autumn, and have high hopes for a release that is accepted by our users really fast (avoiding a KDE 4.0 situation). GNOME hackers have done good stuff for ages, and 3.0 will be a new example!

GNOME 2.24 in Debian unstable, and the road ahead

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:32:00 +0000

GNOME 2.26 was released last week, and I couldn’t help adding myself to the long list of celebrating posts in Planet GNOME. Looking at the release notes, it looks like this release adds a good number of very visible features, and also keeps improving on ongoing transitions like gvfs.

The Debian GNOME team is obviously not ignoring this fact and started to work very hard on updating GNOME for squeeze as soon as the lenny freeze was over.

First, the new versions of GLib and GTK+ were uploaded to unstable, and managed to transition to testing very easily. The rest of GNOME 2.24 bits, which had been patiently waiting on experimental for months, has been uploaded with care not to disrupt any of the many transitions the Debian release team is currently dealing with. You can have a quick glance at how things are going in our 2.24 status page, but the summary is that most of GNOME 2.24 is in unstable, with a few notable exceptions which are held back by ongoing testing transitions. Namedly, evolution-data-server is trying to trickle into testing, which is in turn holding the final bits: gnome-panel, nautilus and related packages, but we think this will be over soon.

As soon as GNOME 2.24 is safe in squeeze, we’ll immediately turn our focus to the new GNOME 2.26 release. Our initial plan is to package the trivial bits and leaf packages which can’t break stuff for unstable, and herd the more complex modules via experimental, to avoid breaking unstable at all. There are some exceptions; we plan to keep gnome-session 2.22 in unstable/testing until 2.26.1 is released to avoid getting a broken session saving in Debian.

People might wonder why we insist on hitting what would seem a dead horse by first dealing with 2.24 and not 2.26 directly. The main reason is that these packages had been ready for a long time, and were in good shape to transition to testing quickly and with little pain. Preparing 2.26 directly would mean throwing away a lot of hours of packaging and polishing effort, and it’s not like we’re releasing squeeze any time soon anyway.

Enjoy the hopefully not too bumpy road to 2.26!

What about GNOME 2.16 and Debian?

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 12:08:00 +0000

I haven’t heard too many people asking if GNOME 2.16 will make etch. Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won’t because nobody would expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that is more interesting.

The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though, as the release clock is ticking. Loïc has spent a big amount of time revamping the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages people can look at. Joss, Guilherme, Loïc and others have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well.

The GNOME 2.16 status page still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on, with GTK+ 2.10 in place.

But we still haven’t decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16 transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of GTK 2.10’s file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix as I write, but we don’t know when there’ll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui available. If we learn it’s due soon, we might start speaking to our release managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news, it’ll probably be too late.

Updates on the GNOME 2.8 transition

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:25:00 +0000

We’ve spent the last two days carefully selecting what packages we should build and upload in an order that makes life easier for autobuilders.

Yesterday, the first few libraries were uploaded, as well as the user-guide. Some people had problems because a few packages didn’t make it into incoming on time so some bits were uninstallable due to gnome-keyring depending on new atk.

Today, we’ve continued with important libs like libgnome/libgnomeui, libbonobo, eel and gnome-vfs. We’ve also uploaded a few apps now: bug-buddy and nautilus have hit sid and incoming respectively. As nautilus didn’t make it to unstable by a few minutes, you should be careful about doing dist-upgrades today. apt will probably want to remove nautilus entirely, so I suggest you don’t do it. :) That, or you pick libeel, libnautilus and nautilus from incoming, which will also work.

Sadly, in the process of building some of these packages, pbuilder left an active bind-mount of my local Debian mirror and I, trying to get rid of the bogus unclean build dir, recursively deleted the mirror entirely. Of course, this has slowed me down a lot, to the point that I had to ask Sjoerd to sponsor libgnomecanvas for me while I pick up the bits.

Maybe I’m a bit too optimistic, but I hope that maybe tomorrow we’ll be able to finish all the builds, and we’ll just have to wait for the autobuilders to do their work. At first everything went smooth, but they are already stuck in dep-wait failures due to libgnome, nautilus and others not having all the build-deps in place. Hopefully all the buildd’s will retry soon…

A final note, remember not to happily dist-upgrade your unstable box today. Before that, check that nautilus isn’t in your “to be removed list…

Damn rain, nice meta-gnome2

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 09:38:00 +0000

After managing to get up more or less on time quite early, dressing up with the cycling clothes, having copious breakfast and preparing my bike, I rushed out the garage to join my teammates at the meeting point… to find out it was raining quite heavily. Oh well.

20 minutes later, I do my daily checking of Internet stuff and what do I I find?

 - meta-gnome2 is going in after 3 days (hinted by cjwatson)

Hooray! Thanks Kamion, vorlon and aj!

Finally, all lined up

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 17:34:00 +0000

After days of annoying different people and mailing lists, meta-gnome2 is finally ready to enter Debian testing during Saturday’s testing run. Yesterday, one of the two required browsers, epiphany-browser, finally made it into testing, while planner, libgda2 and libgnomedb got their missing builds. libxslt is ready to go in tonight, unblocking the way for abiword, too. The only missing bit was sound-juicer, which I demoted to Suggests: for now in the new version I uploaded yesterday. Two days of wait and, hooray, testing will have all the important bits of GNOME installed (for i386 and powerpc, at last). We’ll have to keep looking for a few missing builds for a handful of packages for 3 architectures. Kamion and I are tracking the status daily at the DebianWiki. Many thanks to aj and Kamion for the nice help with most of this, specially with the big jack-audio-connection-kit hinting, and the s390 and m68k guys for not getting too pissed at me when I requested random builds. :) At last I’ll be able to stop looking at build logs every 6h looking for the happy “maybe-successful” tag… not Kamion, who apparently has to nurse KDE in now, good luck. ;)

I also made a quick upload of mailutils, basically to link it against the new libidn11. In the upstream trench, Maildir support landed in CVS on Wednesday, adding to the already available support for mh, mbox and imap mailboxes in GNU Mailutils. Some people have been waiting for Maildir support for many months, and it’s finally here. I hope this makes more people give mailutils-imap4d a go, even if there’s a severe lack of good documentation right now. I’ll upload a new snapshot to Debian unstable in a few days, just in case a mail-eating bug has crawled into the new code.

Thanks to the two persons that mailed me privately about my personal fight against IE’s stupidity. It finally wasn’t a transparent PNG issue, but IE not grokking position statements on the global body block of CSS, or something similar. Ross put me on the right track, and I have it nearly fixed now.

My cold is nearly gone now. I have been training since Monday and except that day when I couldn’t breathe too much, the other sessions have been nice. Of course, I’m sleep deprived again, but that’s a minor side-effect. :)

Last, but not least, tbm, I do not suck!

Big day for meta-gnome2

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 20:18:00 +0000

A few nice things happened in the meta-gnome2 front: yesterday, aj and Kamion kicked jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib into testing, clearing the way for a number of packages like gst-plugins and the packages that depended on it gnome-media, nautilus-media, rhythmbox, etc. Today, aj removed the remaining 7 days of wait for libbonobo, and this is unblocking a new set of packages; and Kinnison did a quick processing of libxslt, which was again stuck on the new/ queue in auric. This will fix the builds of most of the remaining meta-gnome2 problems, so if no new problems come up, it’s should be mostly ready when a few of the affected packages get retried. When/if the “must have” packages are in, I’ll consider doing a temporary upload removing the less important packages so meta-gnome2 can go in, making Sarge’s testing a bit more realistic for people who are doing desktop installs. You never know, given our record of bad luck until now…

When the GNOME mess gets messier...

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 18:22:00 +0000

My cold isn’t getting any better, and patience is not abundant anymore. Pills make me sleepy, and I can’t concentrate too much to do Real Stuff when I sit down to do it.

Day 1 of the GNOME mini-freeze wasn’t too successful. Abiword stumbled upon a new gcc-3.3 ICE, and while libxslt was fixed, it introduced another RC bug which makes builds using that package fail. The new libbonobo had newer shlibs, and the last buildd that needed to build libbonoboui picked that dep, so now both of the libs wait 10 days. Galeon keeps failing with a misterious “errno 3” when the buildd tries to execute gnome-autogen.sh, but just on two arches. I suggested the maintainer to stop autogen’ing galeon at build time, just to see, but it’s weird anyway.

On the bright side, s390 compiled a few of the important packages that were missing like gnome-panel, gnome-applets or libbonoboui, and while they now depend on new libbonobo, it will solve some of the most important problems.

Did two uploads recently, one of them to fix an amusing bug in TWIG, which I have been trying to give away for ages now. Looks like the person in charge of taking it (hi Ignacio ;) is taking action, finally.

Some PlanetGNOME (I guess) reader mailed me a link on a blog entry by Seth Nickell just a few months ago, where he just talked about the same procrastination problem. There’s a nice essay on this there. Thanks for the link, Colin & Seth!

Sorting the GNOME puzzle for Sarge

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 19:50:00 +0000

The Debian Installer folks get a lot of reports about GNOME being completely broken when they install Sarge. This is because tasksel pulls the “gnome-core” meta-package, which suppossedly would install GNOME 2.4, but on testing, gnome-core is still the GNOME1.x-based package, so people don’t even get gnome-session installed.

meta-gnome2 isn’t in testing yet because a lot of its dependencies aren’t in either, for a variety of reasons. So far, we’ve faced a GNOME 2.2 -> 2.4 transition which got a bit more complicated than expected due to a libtool bug. Shortly after, Debian got compromised just when things looked bright. Then, the buildd’s weren’t running. Recently, gcc broke on mips/mipsel, and python2.3 broke completely, making most of our packages unbuildable. jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib are also having problems to enter testing, and that’s also holding a few chunks, but Kamion has a plan for aj to fix this.

I have posted a proposal for a mini GNOME freeze to debian-gtk-gnome, with a list of the current problems and what needs to happen.

In other news, Alioth is finally back, and I’ve been able to commit my pending stuff, and release gnome-mud 0.10.4a-1 to incoming. The ALSA Psychos moved their CVS tree to Alioth today, but we can’t upload 1.0.0rc2 because it looks like upstream changed the build system and the tree refuses to clean now. That’s our only pending issue, so if you’re an Debian ALSA user and want to poke at it, you’re more than welcome. :)